Short Takes

Fernando Manuel da Costa will speak for a few minutes tonight at the Ashkenazic synagogue in Lisbon.
That's not unusual for the 32-year-old native of the Portuguese capital; he's been attending Shabbat services there for nearly two decades. Now da Costa wants to tell other Portuguese with suspect Jewish roots how they can return to the fold.

Determined to stop construction of a "desecrating" sunken walkway through Poland's Belzec concentration camp, activist Rabbi Avi Weiss filed a lawsuit in state Supreme Court against the American Jewish Committee, this time naming himself as a co-plaintiff.
But AJCommittee executive director David Harris labeled the lawsuit "frivolous" and defended the walkway, or "trench," as part of a necessary $4 million permanent memorial to the nearly half-million Jewish victims buried in mass graves at the death camp.

Jennifer Mesrie had planned to study drama this summer. Michal Benzaquen was going to earn some money as a lifeguard. Shaanan Meyerstein "was definitely going to travel somewhere."
All three are traveling to South America this month: as Jewish community volunteers, not tourists.

The lone survivor of a crash in upstate Monticello that killed three members of a Lubavitcher family has returned to her home in Brooklyn.
Rachel Leah Scheinfeld, 10, received only minor injuries when a car driven by her grandfather was run over by a tractor trailer on Route 17B. The grandfather, Isaac Scheinfeld, 65, was killed, as was his daughter, Bella Raksin, 44, who was Rachel's aunt. Scheinfeld's wife, Rose, 62, died at the scene.

The interviews were going on back-to-back and side-by-side. In one closet-size office at a public relations firm on Seventh Avenue, the Israeli actor Oren Rehany talked about his film debut in “The Holy Land,” which opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan. Next door, Rehany’s co-star Tchelet Semel described the challenges of portraying a Russian prostitute when she is neither. One office over it was Saul Stein, slimmed down from his role as the burly American bar owner, Mike, but still exhibiting the character’s gravely voice and toothy grin.

A student group at Rutgers University is planning a pro-Palestinian event on campus in October, expected to draw 500 anti-Israel activists from across the nation.
The New Jersey Solidarity Movement will host the National Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, with the intention of teaching students to pressure their universities to divest in companies that do business with Israel.
An organizer of the event, Charlotte Kates, told The New York Post she considered Palestinian bombings "a very powerful tool of justice."